The Baseball Palace of the World: Comiskey Park and Eighty Years on 35th Street

Charles Comiskey bought a city dump. In January 1909, the owner of the Chicago White Sox purchased a tract of land near the corner of 35th Street and Shields Avenue in the Armour Square neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. The site sat roughly four blocks north of the team's existing home at South Side Park, a wooden facility that Comiskey considered inadequate for the franchise he had been building since 1900. He commissioned architect Zachary Taylor Davis to design a permanent concrete-and-steel ballpark, and to prepare, Davis toured stadiums around the country with White Sox pitcher Ed Walsh, studying sight lines, drainage, and how a park could favor pitching. Walsh got his wish. The resulting dimensions ran 362 feet down each line and 420 feet to dead center, among the most generous in professional baseball.

Workers laid the cornerstone on St. Patrick's Day, 1910. Construction consumed 11,000 cubic yards of concrete, 1,800 tons of steel, and 2.8 million bricks, at a total cost of roughly $750,000. The ballpark opened on July 1, 1910, under the name White Sox Park, before an official crowd of 24,900, though newspaper estimates ran closer to 30,000. The occasion produced the wrong kind of first: St. Louis beat the White Sox 2-0 in a game that proved Walsh's pitcher-friendly field worked exactly as designed, just not in Chicago's favor. The name Comiskey Park came into common use within a few years, and the press began calling it the Baseball Palace of the World.

Four World Series and a Scandal

Comiskey Park hosted its first World Series in 1917, when the White Sox defeated the New York Giants in six games behind the pitching of Eddie Cicotte and Red Faber. The following year, the Chicago Cubs borrowed the park for their home games in the 1918 World Series against Boston, because Comiskey's upper deck held twice the crowd of the Cubs' Weeghman Park. Babe Ruth pitched a shutout for Boston in Game 1.

Then came October 1919. The White Sox entered the World Series against Cincinnati as heavy favorites. Eight players, underpaid by Comiskey and lured by gamblers reportedly connected to Arnold Rothstein, agreed to lose on purpose. Chicago dropped the Series five games to three in the best-of-nine format. A grand jury investigation the following year led to the indictment of the eight players. A jury acquitted them in August 1921, but Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned all eight from professional baseball for life. The Black Sox scandal defined the franchise for decades. The White Sox would not return to the World Series until 1959, a forty-year drought that hung over 35th Street like lake-effect weather.

The East-West Classic and black baseball

Comiskey Park's role extended well beyond the American League. The Chicago American Giants, one of black baseball's most storied franchises, used the park as their home from 1941 to 1950, playing when the White Sox were on the road. Rube Foster had founded the American Giants in 1911, and the team won Negro National League pennants in 1920, 1921, and 1922 before a fire on December 23, 1940, destroyed their original home, Schorling Park.

The park's deepest connection to black baseball was the East-West All-Star Game, which debuted on September 10, 1933, just two months after the first major league All-Star Game was played on the same field. Pittsburgh Crawfords owner Gus Greenlee organized the inaugural contest, and 19,568 fans watched the West beat the East 11-7. Over the next 27 years, the East-West Game returned to Comiskey Park annually, drawing crowds that rivaled and sometimes exceeded the major league version. On August 1, 1943, with Satchel Paige making his first East-West start, 51,723 packed the stands. Between 1942 and 1948, the game averaged 44,560 fans per year. In total, 28 East-West All-Star Games were played at Comiskey Park, more than at any other venue, and they featured more than 20 future Hall of Famers.

The First All-Star Game and the Go-Go Sox

On July 6, 1933, Comiskey Park hosted the first major league All-Star Game, organized by Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward to coincide with the city's Century of Progress Exposition. Connie Mack managed the American League; John McGraw came out of retirement to manage the National League. A crowd of 47,595 filled the park on a cloudless afternoon. Babe Ruth's two-run home run off Bill Hallahan in the third inning gave the American League a lead it never relinquished, and the AL won 4-2. What was conceived as a one-time exhibition became a permanent fixture of the baseball calendar.

The park's greatest extended celebration came in 1959, when the Go-Go White Sox won the American League pennant for the first time in four decades. Built around speed, defense, and pitching rather than power, the roster featured MVP Nellie Fox at second base, Luis Aparicio at shortstop, and Cy Young Award winner Early Wynn on the mound. Chicago clinched the pennant on September 22 with a 4-2 win at Cleveland. That night, back in Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered the city's 110 air raid sirens activated in celebration, their five-minute wail terrifying thousands of Chicagoans who, at the height of the Cold War, assumed the worst. The World Series brought Los Angeles to 35th Street, and the Dodgers took the championship in six games. It was the last World Series played at old Comiskey Park.

Veeck, the Scoreboard, and Disco Demolition

Bill Veeck bought the White Sox in 1959 and immediately began remaking the fan experience. His signature addition debuted on May 1, 1960: a $300,000 exploding scoreboard, 130 feet wide, mounted in center field. When a White Sox player hit a home run, the board erupted with fireworks, flashing strobes, and spinning pinwheels while sirens howled. Veeck said he got the idea from a Jimmy Cagney movie in which a character hits a pinball jackpot. Opposing teams hated it. Chicago fans loved it. The scoreboard set the template for every pyrotechnic display in every stadium that followed.

Veeck sold the team, bought it again in 1975, and continued staging promotions designed to fill seats on a shoestring budget. Most worked. One did not. On July 12, 1979, the White Sox offered 98-cent admission to anyone who brought a disco record to Disco Demolition Night, a promotion cooked up by Veeck's son Mike and WLUP rock disc jockey Steve Dahl. The 98-cent price referenced WLUP's 97.9 FM frequency. At least 50,000 fans showed up, thousands more crashed the gates, and the scene devolved when Dahl detonated a crate of disco records on the field between games of a doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers. An estimated 5,000 to 7,000 people stormed the field. A bonfire burned in center field, a batting cage was destroyed, and bases were stolen, literally. Police in tactical gear needed 40 minutes to clear the diamond. The White Sox forfeited the second game. Thirty-nine people were arrested. The event remains the most infamous promotion in baseball history.

The Final Out

By the late 1980s, Comiskey Park was the oldest active ballpark in the major leagues, a distinction it had held since 1971. The Illinois state legislature approved funding for a new stadium directly across 35th Street, and the old park's final season was 1990.

On September 30, 1990, a crowd of 42,849 watched the White Sox beat the Seattle Mariners 2-1. Lance Johnson hit a wind-aided triple in the sixth inning. Bobby Thigpen, who set a major league record with 57 saves that season, recorded the final out when Harold Reynolds grounded to second baseman Scott Fletcher, who threw to Steve Lyons at first at 4:23 P.M. Central time. Organist Nancy Faust played "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" one last time.

Demolition began in early 1991 and stretched through the summer, starting from behind the right field corner. The new Comiskey Park opened across the street on April 18, 1991. Where the old park stood, a parking lot now serves the replacement stadium, currently named Rate Field. A marble plaque in the sidewalk marks the location of home plate. The old foul lines are painted on the asphalt. A spectator ramp on 35th Street traces the curve of the vanished grandstand.

Zachary Taylor Davis also designed Weeghman Park, which opened in 1914 and still stands today as Wrigley Field. His North Side ballpark survived. His South Side ballpark did not. For eighty seasons, the Baseball Palace of the World sat in Armour Square, tight against the neighborhood, its exploding scoreboard visible for blocks. The parking lot keeps none of that.